Month: February 2014

The Economist notes the surprising rise of “dry bars” in Britain, with three operating in London, Liverpool, and Nottingham and two more set to open soon:

Unlike many cafés, they stay open late. They emulate bars in other ways, with live music, comedy acts and films to pull in punters. When the lights go down and the DJ plays at Sobar, which opened in Nottingham in January, it looks like any city bar, hopes Alex Gillmore, the manager. Redemption misses the hefty profits made on alcohol, but temperance brings its own benefits. Business remains steady throughout the week rather than spiking at the weekend, says Catherine Salway, its founder. The absence of drunken, obstreperous patrons means that bouncers are unnecessary.

Sobar, like the Brink in Liverpool, is linked to a do-gooding drug and alcohol charity. But ordinary drinking dens are becoming a little drier, too, out of business sense rather than temperance principle. Pubs can make almost as much selling food as drink – and more are serving it. Both in pubs and at home, less boozy drinks are becoming popular. Total sales of beer by volume dropped slightly in the year to January, but those of the weaker kinds, with just 1.3-3.3 percent alcohol by volume, jumped 32 percent, according to Kantar Worldpanel, a market-research firm.

Mark O’Connell investigates how a line from Beckett’s Worstward Ho – “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” – has entered a “strange afterlife as a motivational meme” for the Silicon Valley set:

The entrepreneurial class has adopted the phrase with particular enthusiasm, as a battle cry for a startup culture in which failure has come to be fetishized, even valorized. Sir Richard Branson, that affable old sage of private enterprise and bikini-based publicity shoots, has advocated from on high the benefits of Failing Better. He breaks out the quote near the end of an article about the future of his multinational venture capital conglomerate, telling us with characteristic self-assurance that it comes “from the playwright, Samuel Beckett, but it could just as easily come from the mouth of yours truly.” …

Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive feel, is the literary takeaway par excellence; it’s usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to “think different” or “work smarter” or “just do it.” And the fact is that these six telegraphic bursts of exhortation actually work pretty well as a personal motto, once that sanding and smoothing has been completed. They are also—and this is crucial, though obviously not something Beckett would have had in mind—eminently tweetable; the whole thing comes in at just 69 characters, which leaves people plenty of room for whatever commentary or show of approval they might want to append.

A viral image urging people to unplug:

Rachel Baron Singer challenges “the writer’s questionable sense of nostalgia.” Looking back past the 90s to the Jazz Age parties of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s day, she suggests that meaningful human connection was no easier when people met only face-to-face instead of on Facebook:

[A]part from the wild parties, [artists and socialites] Gerald and Sara Murphy are also famous for being the inspiration behind Dick and Nicole Diver, the alluring but emotionally insolvent protagonists of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, a novel that is, if nothing else, a tale of detachment and marital loneliness. The book is rife with comments about how alone Dick and Nicole feel in one another’s company (and with friends and lovers, to boot). In one scene, in which the pair sits in frosty silence, Fitzgerald notes how Dick “often felt lonely with [Nicole],” and in another, he describes Nicole as “leading a lonely life, owning Dick, who did not want to be owned.” Most poignantly, in Chapter 12, Fitzgerald writes: ” . . . they sat with the children on the Moorish roof and watched the fireworks of two casinos, far apart, far down on the shore. It was lonely and sad to be so empty-hearted toward each other.”

How much of this sentiment is based upon impressions of the Murphys versus Fitzgerald’s own fractured relationship with [his wife] Zelda is difficult to say, but the point still stands that in the literary imagination of the Jazz Age, people who engage in the most public, grandiose acts of socialization (what our sign writer might consider to be living), are the ones who are the most isolated from real human interaction. This is certainly a prevalent theme in The Great Gatsby, where lavish, glamorous parties — undoubtedly influenced to some degree by those thrown by the Murphys — are portrayed as the ultimate symbol of social disengagement. Gatsby is as alone at his parties as he is in death, and that goes for anyone and everyone else.

Bill Andrews points to a study that “shows statistically that attractiveness correlated positively with performance among cyclists who completed the 2012 Tour de France.” The idea behind the study:

Just get headshots of 80 male cyclists who finished the grueling Tour de France, put them up on www.fluidsurveys.com, and have people rate them on a scale of 1–5 (5 being the dreamiest). Then, compare the cyclists’ hot-or-not ratings with how they did in the race. Sole author Erik Postma also asked the participants to rate the man’s masculinity and likeability, and asked whether the rater, if female, was on hormonal contraception.

The results were clear. The most attractive men were also, unbeknownst to raters, the riders that performed best. This correlation was strongest in women not on the pill. (The effect was about the same for women on it and men, interestingly enough.) A rider’s perceived masculinity didn’t seem to have anything to do with his performance; there was a positive relationship between performance and likeability but it, too, was mostly dependent on the guy’s looks.

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Here at the Dish we continuously post poems from a wide range of poets and eras, but February is Black History Month, and in this moment of such an extraordinary flowering of achievement among black poets in our country, presenting a slew of marvelous poems by writers in this tradition all throughout the month is happily irresistible.

This also gives us a chance to honor the book from which these poems are drawn, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, edited by Charles Henry Rowell and praised by Edward Hirsch, poet, essayist, and President of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, as “the most thoroughly engaging and inclusive anthology of contemporary African American poetry to date.”

Our first selection is “Clay Bison in a Cave” by Clarence Major:

Clay-tan, eyeless,
voiceless, even in a sense weightless,
in motion yet motionless still
for centuries and centuries,
stuck in this motion
of climbing, perhaps lost, these
two Paleolithic bison,
heads lifted, strained back
to the black endless sky,
as they climb toward sunny grass.
Which black sky? Which grass?
Rock-step by rock-step,
up they go, on up and up.
The black sky at the top of the cave.
The grass that is always
more a promise in a dream
than that sweet kiss
blown by water-colored wind.

(Reprinted from Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, edited by Charles Henry Rowell © 2013 by Charles Henry Rowell. Used by kind permission of Coffee House Press. Painting of a bison in the cave of Altamira, Spain, via Wikimedia Commons)